Notices of Memoirs — The Geological Survey. 309 



Director, au office which for some years he filled gratuitously. The 

 infant museum was in charge of the Office of Woods and Forests, 

 but the Geological Survey still remained under the Board of 

 Ordnance.^ 



A further part of the Director's wide-reaching scheme was soon 

 put into execution in the premises at Craig's Court. He had planned 

 that besides obtaining information from specimens, models, diagrams, 

 and maps, the public should be enabled at a moderate cost to procure 

 analyses of rocks, minerals, and soils from the establishment under 

 his control. He was authorized to fit up a laboratory and to appoint 

 as Curator of the Museum one of the ablest analytical chemists of his 

 time, Richard Phillips. He likewise procured the sanction of the 

 Office of Woods for the institution of lectures, having for their 

 object the illustration of the applications of geology and of- its 

 associated sciences to the useful purposes of life. Owing to the 

 want of a suitable theatre and other appliances the design of 

 providing lectures could not be carried into execution for twelve 

 years. But eventually in the Autumn of 1851, when the building 

 in Jermyn Street was inaugurated, De la Beche's scheme was 

 carried out by the opening of the School of Mines. ^ 



There was one further department which owes its foundation 

 to the indomitable energy of De la Beche. In 1838 the British 

 Association had memorialized the Government to take steps to collect 

 and preserve all plans recording the mining operations of the United 

 Kingdom, inasmuch as great loss of life and destruction of property 

 had arisen from the want of the proper preservation of such documents. 

 The Director of the Geological Survey was accordingly authorized 

 to form a Mining Eecord Office as part of his establishment at 

 Craig's Court. This new undertaking started in 1840, under the 

 charge of T, B. Jordan, who was succeeded in 1845 by Eobert Hunt. 

 A large series of mining plans was gradually accumulated, and a 

 yearly volume was issued embodying the statistics of the mineral 

 industries of the United Kingdom. These statistics were obtained 

 from the information voluntarily supplied by the proprietors, lessees, 

 and others. Eventually, however, an Act of Parliament compelled 

 the mine-owners to furnish the statistics to the Inspectors of Mines, 

 who published them in their Eeport to the Home Office. As it thus 

 became unnecessary that two similar returns should be published, 

 and as it seemed desirable that the work of the Mining Eecord Office 

 should be brought into closer relations with the Inspectors of Mines, 



1 Account of the Museum of Economic Geolog)-, by T. Sopwith, 1843 ; Buckland, 

 Proc. Geol. Soc, vol. iii, pp. 211, 221 ; Life of A. C. Eamsay, p. 39. 



- The School of Mines continued to form part of the Jermyn Street establishment 

 for more than twenty years. The progress of scientific education in that interval, 

 however, demanded more space for practical instruction than the building could 

 supply. Accordingly, in 1872, the depaijtments of chemistry, physics, and biology 

 were transferred to more commodious quarters erected by the Science and Art 

 Department at South Kensington, and the other departments were similarly 

 transferred as space could be provided for them. The last Professor at Jermyn 

 Street was the late Warington W. Smyth, on whose death, in 1890, _the mining- 

 instruction was also removed to South Kensington. 



